Howa 1500 torque settings.

Hi guys, my names Dylan and I have only recently got in to hunting and have brought my first rifle, a Howa 1500 in .270. It was shooting well and had inch groups at 100m but the other day I noticed both the screws on the bottom metal were loose as, I tightened them up with a torx Allen key and went out today and it's now shooting about 6" low at 200m. Before I zero it in again this weekend is there a specific torque setting I should apply to the screws? Any info would be awesome.
Love the page btw and I think I've read every post in the gear and equipment forum heaps of great information and tips for someone just starting out.

No specific torque settings, just nip them both up by hand - firm but not ridiculously tight.

I like to torque mine to the same setting every time. The Howa synthetic Hogue stocks are pillar bedded (assume that’s what you have got?).

40 inch pounds is my setting for this stock, with the floating recoil lug.

Ok cool I'll just go with what I've done for now (firm but not over tight) and go from there until I grab a torque wrench.

Put some thread lock on the screws, or your
'other halves' nail varnish.

Tight is tight. Seriously people get way too uptight about torque settings on "average" range hunting rifles. As @gundoc said -firm but not ridiculously tight.

If you are shooting for competition or long range Thar then yes, absolutely get an inch/pound torque driver. But if you can afford one do it anyway.

Hunting for most of NZ, tight and then a 1/4 or half turn more. But write it down and do it the same anytime you remove barrelled action. I have never had any noticeable POI shift stock off and on but that may be lucky. All rifles behave in mysterious ways.



Also the nail polish is a good one.

@Howa270 If it is a new gun then it would pay to check the scope mounts screws etc as well as these can work loose if they were not done properly to start with. A gunsmith wont make that mistake, but a lot of the counter jockeys that fit these up are not gunsmiths .....You dont have to be a smith to do it properly, and it is not difficult to learn. I think you are on the right track. Welcome to the "club"....

Some more questions.
- How many shots did you fire at 200 to find out its low?
- Was the rest the same for both?
- What group size do you get at 200 ?
- How much shooting have you done? How much practise have you had?

This may seem silly, but if you are new to shooting and you are capable of a 6 inch group at 200m then you are doing pretty well. If you first couple shots were about right and your next is 6" low, that doe not mean it has to be the rifle. It can be, but it could also be the shooter. Or a change in technique. Hopefully just the screws.....

Practice and practice well

Gday mate.
Yeah I had the same issue with my Howa .243, after 30 or so rounds my groups were opening up noticeably. I packed up and went home thinking I was just fatigued or what not.
Once I was home and about to get into cleaning the rifle I found the screws were incredibly loose that the action was moving around inside the stock.
I did mine up by hand with a bit of that blue medium strength Loctite. Coincidentally I think it was the labelled “243” although it has nothing to do with firearms. I did it right and then a little tweak more and I don’t suspect it will need redoing anytime soon.
Where are you shooting out to 200m at?

If it is a new rifle, has it been cleaned properly. Could be Cu fouling

@timattalon Its a secondhand rifle that apparently only had 80 down the tube. I fired 3 shots and all of them missed the target and hit the ground under it so it's hard to know the grouping, after 3 misses I decided something was wrong and called it a day. It may well be my shooting and I'll hopefully find out tomorrow if I get a chance to take it out again. I haven't had a huge amount of time behind a centrefire but have shot a fair bit of .22.
@Sako851 I'll give the nail polish trick a go and if I need to, will grab some loctite. I'm shooting down at my local river, right down The end where is impossible for anyone to get past, then shooting into a large bank. Probably not the best place in the world but even though I know it's safe I dont like shooting more than 3-5 rounds down there at a time. I'm hoping to get to the Ashburton range early next year and spend a decent amount of time behind the gun.
It was clean when I got it but have cleaned it again after 20 or so rounds and will probably clean and oil it after every use.

Sounds like a good spot

It would be possible to do up bedding screws too loose or too tight and crush it specially for a wooden stock or synthetic if there's no pillar.

It seems as if professional gunsmiths dont use a torque wrench much. They probably have a good feel for it - better than any mechanical device.

Most hunters get by just fine using common sense and amateur feel.

In between are torque wrench users who tend to be high users like flyblown who take stocks on and off regularly and like a system to get them back on consistently. And target shooters who may be tuning their individual gun for peak accuracy.

And its also worth mentioning that years ago I fcuked up my Tikka Laminate stock, gradually, over time, by overtighening it by hand with a simple quarter inch drive, back at the hut. I’d strip the rifle down in the evening after a wet hunt, and reassemble next morning. It wasn’t pillar bedded and little by little I was compressing the laminate under the bottom metal by using the “one size fits all” method of “feeling” when it was tight enough... except for me “tight enough” was too tight... stupid but easily done if you’re used to pillar bedded stocks, which all my other rifles were / are.

Fixed it by inserting pillars and epoxy bedding the bottom metal and the action. But lesson learned.

I find that if you keep changing tools to tighten your action screws, its very easy to overdo it. E.g. using the Tikka supplied T-Wrench vs a quarter inch drive with a long bar on it. Grab that bar towards the end of the handle and give it a tweak and you can be up around 70-80 inch pounds or more in the blink of an eye. Best to get one took that you know is right, and stick to it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Howa270

@timattalon Its a secondhand rifle that apparently only had 80 down the tube. I fired 3 shots and all of them missed the target and hit the ground under it so it's hard to know the grouping, after 3 misses I decided something was wrong and called it a day. It may well be my shooting and I'll hopefully find out tomorrow if I get a chance to take it out again. I haven't had a huge amount of time behind a centrefire but have shot a fair bit of .22.
@Sako851 I'll give the nail polish trick a go and if I need to, will grab some loctite. I'm shooting down at my local river, right down The end where is impossible for anyone to get past, then shooting into a large bank. Probably not the best place in the world but even though I know it's safe I dont like shooting more than 3-5 rounds down there at a time. I'm hoping to get to the Ashburton range early next year and spend a decent amount of time behind the gun.
It was clean when I got it but have cleaned it again after 20 or so rounds and will probably clean and oil it after every use.

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A quick check at closer range could be in order. Try getting a black square about 2 or 3 inches across and stick it to the middle of a white A4 page (or similar). Then with the rifle in a steady look down the barrel at the target until the target is in the middle of what you can see down the barrel. Then look through the scope without touching or moving the rifle and see if the barrel is pointing at the same point as the scope. In both cases do not touch the rifle. It must not move between looking at one or the other. (This is called bore sighting)

A quick trick we use for sighting in is get it spot on centre at 25 metres (not a bigger distance) then when it is, check what it is at 100m (should hopefully be about 1 or 2 inches high but hopefully centred above the centre of the target) Then 2 inches high at 100m should be fairly close to dead centre at 200m.

Saves you a lot of time making holes in the ground which is wasting ammo.

And practise, practise practise. The more you are familiar with the rifle, the better you will shoot.

Yeah mate... great advice... seen it as high as 8 -10 inches depending on the ammo.. some rounds will climb faster in trajectory... I have a set of bore sight rounds... laser dots at 100 yds... bloody accurate


Quote...A quick trick we use for sighting in is get it spot on centre at 25 metres (not a bigger distance) then when it is, check what it is at 100m (should hopefully be about 1 or 2 inches high but hopefully centred above the centre of the target) Then 2 inches high at 100m should be fairly close to dead centre at 200m.

This is an interesting subject,with regards to the info being proffered here ,and never really thought much about...I have a new rifle with a new scope,all brand new stuff.Ive always put my picaninny rails,scope mounts/rings etc on myself.....Looked at the fine details of various manufacturers,some give torque settings some don’t......have decided from the advice of others here to buy the torque tool (they are cheap here)and do it the methodical way as opposed to the” No8 wire,she,ll be right”method.......no offense....

Sorry to hear about that laminate stock @Flyblown. Was it coming back to the same zero each time you reassembled it ?

I'd like to be able to take mine apart more often to clear out leaves water oil and stuff and perhaps a torque wrench would let me do that without rechecking by shooting each time.

Once the laminate was compressed, and as it got worse, the rifle started to wander a bit. It wasn't that bad, but it was noticeable. It wasn't returning to battery properly, and I discovered after one long session flinging 180gr pills around that the bottom metal was slightly loose, and the top of the recoil lug was munched.

Since I fixed it up, its been a tack driver.

But the barrelled action is even better in the DPT chassis.

Hmm
I've got a Howa 1500 in 7-08 and had the same issue. Stock screws came loose. Common issue with howa + hogue stock?

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Nope. They just need to be done up tight enough in the first place.

What type of stock do you have on this rifle @Howa270
Here is the torque settings from Nathan Fosters book “The Practical Guide To Bolt Action Rifle Accurizing and Maintenance”
A good read and reference.
Attachment 102130

Here’s the next page:)Attachment 102131

The problem with Mr Foster’s numbers @Sideshow is that he doesn’t necessarily account for the material that the bottom metal is made from. For example a Tikka T3 is plastic with metal washers and I can attest to the fact that the plastic deforms well before you reach some of his recommended numbers. And in the case of the Howa the bottom metal is made from a relatively soft alloy and that also deforms and pushes into the bolt hole.

I have raised this with the odd little community over at Ballistic Studies... good couple of years ago or more I will see if I can find it.

@Sideshow thanks for that, I have the houge stock so when I get a wrench I'll torque them to those numbers with some nail polish on the screws. I should only have to do it once or twice as I'm not planning to pull it apart very often.

Add a light coating of grease to the under side of the action and barrel.
That should keep the rust away tile next year.
But once you have your torque rench you can take it out of the if you feel it’s gotten too wet.
I usual do it once a year unless it gets a heavy dose of rain.